HHS OCR breach portal (HIPAA breaches affecting 500 or more individuals) Primary notice
Posted on the HHS Office for Civil Rights breach portal with a submission date of March 14, 2018.
- Organization as reported
- Saint Francis Hospital, GA
- Entity type as reported
- Healthcare Provider
- Category as reported
Improper Disposal
- Location of information as reported
- Other
- Submission date
- March 14, 2018
- Observed by BreachRecords
- 2026-10-18 16:15 UTC (revision 13892, row:5031)
- Archived copy
- Held in the private archive (provenance)
On January 15, 2018, Saint Francis Hospital, the covered entity (“CE”), discovered that a new custodian had inadvertently disposed of some bins containing protected health information (PHI) in the regular trash, potentially exposing the names, dates of birth, addresses, social security numbers, clinical and payment information of 1,388 individuals. The CE provided timely breach notification to HHS, to the affected individuals and to the media. At the time of the breach and currently, the CE trained its employees on the proper disposal of PHI. In its response to the breach, the CE retrained its employees and the custodial company, and implemented additional safeguards to prevent the improper disposal of PHI in the future. OCR obtained assurances that the CE implemented the corrective actions listed above.